Sanford workers pledge to fight salmon plant job cuts
Workers at New Zealand salmon farmer Sanford have said they will fight plans to cut 30 jobs at the company’s processing plant, almost halving the workforce.
Union members met on Friday to discuss options to challenge the proposal for the plant at Bluff, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, Radio New Zealand reported on its website.
E tū union delegate Karen Wilson told RNZ the job cuts would hit the workers, families and their community hard.
The Sanford plant processes the company’s king (chinook) salmon farmed off nearby Stewart Island and white fish landed by local fishermen. White fish processing is to be moved more than 250 miles north to Timaru.
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Sanford’s chief executive Volker Kuntzsch defended a decision not to tell staff about upcoming job losses until the last minute, arguing that if the company had announced possible job losses a month in advance, it would have created huge uncertainty.
Despite the job losses, Kuntzsch is confident about the future of salmon in Bluff, reported RNZ.
“With our recent consent approval to increase the amount of farming we can do at Stewart Island, there’s a fantastic future for that operation,” he said.
Earlier this year Sanford sold its pelagic assets in Tauranga to local company Pelco. The assets included three purse seine fishing vessels, processing equipment and pelagic quota in Fisheries Management Area 1.
In its 2019 interim report published in May, Sanford said the sale strongly aligned with its value-focused strategy. “Sanford’s ability to improve returns on species like mackerel is dependent on economies of scale, global commodity pricing and consumer preferences, which we cannot influence globally,” said the company in the report.
